AWS Hot Startups – August 2017

There’s no doubt about it – Artificial Intelligence is changing the world and how it operates. Across industries, organizations from startups to Fortune 500s are embracing AI to develop new products, services, and opportunities that are more efficient and accessible for their consumers. From driverless cars to better preventative healthcare to smart home devices, AI is driving innovation at a fast rate and will continue to play a more important role in our everyday lives.

This month we’d like to highlight startups using AI solutions to help companies grow. We are pleased to feature:

SignalBox – a simple and accessible deep learning platform to help businesses get started with AI.

Valossa – an AI video recognition platform for the media and entertainment industry.

In 2016, SignalBox founder Alain Richardt was hearing the same comments being made by developers, data scientists, and business leaders. They wanted to get into deep learning but didn’t know where to start. Alain saw an opportunity to commodify and apply deep learning by providing a platform that does the heavy lifting with an easy-to-use web interface, blueprints for common tasks, and just a single-click to productize the models. With SignalBox, companies can start building deep learning models with no coding at all – they just select a data set, choose a network architecture, and go. SignalBox also offers step-by-step tutorials, tips and tricks from industry experts, and consulting services for customers that want an end-to-end AI solution.

SignalBox offers a variety of solutions that are being used across many industries for energy modeling, fraud detection, customer segmentation, insurance risk modeling, inventory prediction, real estate prediction, and more. Existing data science teams are using SignalBox to accelerate their innovation cycle. One innovative UK startup, Energi Mine, recently worked with SignalBox to develop deep networks that predict anomalous energy consumption patterns and do time series predictions on energy usage for businesses with hundreds of sites.

SignalBox uses a variety of AWS services including Amazon EC2, Amazon VPC, Amazon Elastic Block Store, and Amazon S3. The ability to rapidly provision EC2 GPU instances has been a critical factor in their success – both in terms of keeping their operational expenses low, as well as speed to market. The Amazon API Gateway has allowed for operational automation, giving SignalBox the ability to control its infrastructure.

As students at the University of Oulu in Finland, the Valossa founders spent years doing research in the computer science and AI labs. During that time, the team witnessed how the world was moving beyond text, with video playing a greater role in day-to-day communication. This spawned an idea to use technology to automatically understand what an audience is viewing and share that information with a global network of content producers. Since 2015, Valossa has been building next generation AI applications to benefit the media and entertainment industry and is moving beyond the capabilities of traditional visual recognition systems.

Valossa’s AI is capable of analyzing any video stream. The AI studies a vast array of data within videos and converts that information into descriptive tags, categories, and overviews automatically. Basically, it sees, hears, and understands videos like a human does. The Valossa AI can detect people, visual and auditory concepts, key speech elements, and labels explicit content to make moderating and filtering content simpler. Valossa’s solutions are designed to provide value for the content production workflow, from media asset management to end-user applications for content discovery. AI-annotated content allows online viewers to jump directly to their favorite scenes or search specific topics and actors within a video.

Serial entrepreneurs Ray Rahman and Risto Haukioja founded Kaliber in 2016. The pair had previously worked in startups building smart cities and online privacy tools, and teamed up to bring AI to the workplace and change the hospitality industry. Our world is designed to appeal to our senses – stores and warehouses have clearly marked aisles, products are colorfully packaged, and we use these designs to differentiate one thing from another. We tell each other apart by our faces, and previously that was something only humans could measure or act upon. Kaliber is using facial recognition, deep learning, and big data to create solutions for business use. Markets and companies that aren’t typically associated with cutting-edge technology will be able to use their existing camera infrastructure in a whole new way, making them more efficient and better able to serve their customers.

Computer video processing is rapidly expanding, and Kaliber believes that video recognition will extend to far more than security cameras and robots. Using the clients’ network of in-house cameras, Kaliber’s platform extracts key data points and maps them to actionable insights using their machine learning (ML) algorithm. Dashboards connect users to the client’s BI tools via the Kaliber enterprise APIs, and managers can view these analytics to improve their real-world processes, taking immediate corrective action with real-time alerts. Kaliber’s Real Metrics are aimed at combining the power of image recognition with ML to ultimately provide a more meaningful experience for all.

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